[pjc50]

Steam runs content from the internet: the steam store, and all the downloaded games are from the internet.

And where do your apps come from? Wasn't there a thread the other day about installing the top apps from download.com and counting the chaos they inflicted on the system? Sure, you can avoid that, but not everyone does.

[Karunamon]

Steam runs mostly upstream vetted content, i.e. it's identical to the app store. If malicious code makes it through there, everyone is varying degrees of boned, sandboxes be damned. Yeah, it has a web browser, but 99% of the time, that browser is pointed at https://something.steampowered.com.

It's not like an average browser like Chrome where your main use case is running random code from random domains made by random people.

Besides, external apps are non-responsive to the question of whether the tradeoff gained by Apple's variant of sandboxing (where there are certain things you are not ever allowed to do, even if they are integral to the primary purpose of your software) is really worth preventing a limited class of issues?

App store requirements don't stop the user from downloading malware outside of the store. They do stop the user from doing certain things outright, and so push the user outside of the store, and so I'd argue, actually reduce safety as a knock on effect.